Porsche Automobil Holding SE (Porsche SE), the holding company with a controlling interest in the Volkswagen Group, has invested around $55 million for an approximate 10% ownership stake in INRIX through the purchase of both primary and secondary shares.
[1]We’ve written before about the market opportunity that INRIX has [2] (in our industry) with their real-time traffic information and growing portfolio of other apps, analytics and other driver services.
In the last 9 years, INRIX have gone from providing real-time traffic information on a few roads in a few cities to being a leading provider of real-time traffic information worldwide covering over 4 million miles across 40 countries.
In the process, they’ve grown their community of drivers from just a few fleets and app users to a crowd-sourced network of more than 175 million real-time vehicles and devices – combined with other data sources of theirs, this probably represents the largest real-time traffic network in the world.
Bryan Mistele, President and CEO, INRIX said “We’re pleased to have an investor like Porsche SE who shares our vision for transforming INRIX from a traffic data company to a connected car and smart cities leader worldwide.”
He continued “We want to be at the forefront of connecting cars to smarter cities. While we’ve already started delivering services with customers that help drivers do everything from navigate through the day’s traffic to find the closest, least expensive fuel or available parking and EV charging locations, we’re tapping into other forms of data from the connected car to help governments build smarter cities.
These include; Road Weather, Connected Car Services, Enhanced Parking Services and Smart City Analytics.
In June 2014 [2], TAB integrated INRIX data into its measurement system – representing a potential new way to leverage traffic information for the purposes of providing better insight to advertisers.